Columbia and the iron law of institutions

Andrew Gelman pointed me to his post about former Columbia president Lee Bollinger, which in turn led me to this amazing piece of journalism that everybody should read, about Columbia’s multi-decade long enabling of a sexual assaulter on its medical school faculty, and its subsequent years-long coverup of the former.

The piece filled me with rage and disgust, in part because I feel a certain personal connection to it. Lee Bollinger was dean of Michigan’s law school when I was a student there in the late 1980s, while years later my wife worked in the same sexual assault unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office that tried and largely failed to prosecute Robert Hadden for what were probably thousands of sexual assaults over a 25-year period.

The most striking part of this whole saga is that quite literally nobody at Columbia ever suffered any consequences whatsoever for enabling and then covering up 25 years of serial sexual assaults by one of its own faculty members. That very much includes Lee Bollinger, who was making $31,000 per year as a full professor on the Michigan law faculty in 1980, when I was an undergraduate at the university (that’s $125,000 in 2025 money, so hardly peanuts but wait for it), and who bought an apartment on the Upper West Side in 2022 for $11.7 million. Bollinger was paid millions of dollars per year to be Columbia’s president between 2002 and 2023, after having been Michigan’s president for six years before that. He also got to live rent free for all those years in presidential mansions, which helps explains how he managed to squirrel away enough cash to buy that apartment, etc. etc.

Lee Bollinger is technically a lawyer, although like so many other elite legal academics he never actually practiced law, so like Gelman I’m not prone to cut him any breaks for doing — checks notes — absolutely nothing while Columbia enabled and then covered up Hadden’s decades long reign of sexual terror. Relatedly, another striking aspect of the linked article is the fantastic cowardice of everybody at Columbia who had anything to do with this. Even after Hadden was finally sentenced to prison in 2023, exactly one doctor at the institution was willing to talk, even off the record, about what had happened.

And note here that Hadden himself was a nobody: he wasn’t some sort of academic star raking in millions in grants or anything like that. He didn’t even have tenure — as is the standard practice at many medical schools, he was on a year to year contract, so Columbia didn’t require any cause, like say sexually assaulting thousands of his patients, to get rid of him at any time. Instead they put him back into the Columbia ob-gyn clinic two days after he was arrested by the NYPD for sexually assaulting a patient at that very same clinic (the story is filled with similarly incredible details, but you should read it for yourself).

Again the most striking aspect of all this is the sheer cowardice of almost everybody involved, along with the classic institutional response of places like this, which is to circle the wagons in order to protect, in order of importance, (1) the job of any person of significance who might conceivably lose theirs if any actual legal or moral responsibility was brought to bear on anyone at the institution, and (2) the reputation of the institution itself in the public eye, to the extent any reputational damage might cost somebody important his job (see (1) supra).

Gelman himself is a professor at Columbia, so he’s a striking and extraordinarily rare counter-example to this iron law of institutions in action. I also can’t help but think that in its own incredibly grim way this entire story helps throw additional light on how the United States of America ended up with a degenerate demented imbecile as its president, while no one in a position of real power or authority did anything about that unfortunate series of events.